The MAgNet: Agent-based middleware enabling social networking for mobile users

Nowadays social network services play an important role in users' everyday lives. This is especially emphasized in lives of users that belong to Generation Y. Young people often communicate and share various personal information with their family, friends or colleagues through virtual communities that are based on social relations. By introducing social networking concept into the mobile network domain, proliferation and availability of social networking services could be notably expanded. This paper presents the MAgNet, a middleware based on software agent technology that enables social networking services for users in the mobile network domain. The MAgNet enables mobile users to define and customize their social relationships with other users, as well as it uses created relationships to plan and manage group events.